A sincere thank you to everyone who has read the OI over the last few months. I’ve really enjoyed it but I will be returning to work for the BBC in a few weeks’ time.
With that in mind, this will be the last newsletter I send out. I will be taking a bit of time off and planning some work for when I (re)start there.
I think the OI has been a qualified success. I have covered some stories that I am sure would not have been otherwise so I am pleased about that.
There are some things I’m not as happy about but I’ll leave that there!
If you have subscribed over recent weeks, I will refund all that I owe you in the coming days. If there are any issues, please email me on [email protected] or ring me on 07760 972999.
I will leave articles currently behind the paywall behind it for a couple of weeks. But after that I plan to take the paywall down and leave all of the OI’s articles up, at least for the time being.
Thanks again for reading and please remember me if you have any stories in the coming weeks and months.
Oxford University’s business school wants to use a complex on the city’s outskirts for longer ahead of a £60m* move.
Saïd Business School got planning permission to convert the Osney Power Station site in west Oxford in January 2020 and hopes to complete work in mid-2025.
It will move its executive education centre into the complex and out of Egrove Park in Kennington.
Temporary buildings that have been used by the business school since the 1990s need extended temporary planning permission. That has been successfully renewed four times since 2004.
The business school wants the temporary permission at Egrove Park to be extended until the end of May 2027.
Savils, on behalf of the business school, said that will allow courses “to continue to run whilst the [power station’s] construction works are completed and a decant period for staff and equipment to move from one site to the other.”
Once that is done, the agents said the business school will be able to “consider the longer-term future for Egrove Park”.
Egrove Park is in the Oxford Green Belt and buildings were built there between the late 1960s and 1990s.
They were first used by the Oxford Centre for Management Studies, which was renamed Templeton College in 1983 following a donation from investor Sir John Templeton.
Templeton College merged with Green College to become Green Templeton College in 2008. That is based in Woodstock Road in Oxford.
The buildings at Egrove Park were listed in 1999, when Templeton College was still based there.
The business school was set up in 1993. Executive education transferred to the business school in 2005.
*It was £60m work when I wrote about it at the Oxford Mail in 2019 so it might have increased since then.
To the surprise of surely no one, opposition to Oxford United’s proposed new stadium has come from Kidlington residents (though not universally).
According to documents on Cherwell District Council’s website on Friday, 60 people or groups had sent views about the project to the authority.
Of those, eight were opposed. All came from Oxford, Water Eaton or Kidlington.
Conversely, 52 people said they were supportive of the stadium. The geographic spread of that support is much wider. An Oxford United fan who lives in Zeist, a Dutch town near Utrecht, urged Cherwell councillors to support the planning application.
(You can click through to the maps below to explore them if you want to.)
Other early support comes from Runcorn in Cheshire, Bristol and Stourton Caundle in Dorset.
Hundreds (if not more) representations will be made and processed over coming weeks.
Independent city councillors will call for an end to planned traffic filters for Oxford and what they will call “no-evidence-based transport policies”.
Ajaz Rehman, seconded by Shaista Aziz, is set to make the call at Oxford City Council’s meeting next Monday.
Both were Labour councillors before they resigned last October, angered the party would not call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.
They formed the Independent Group with Amar Latif, another councillor who quit Labour with them.
Cllr Rehman will say that LTNs have “failed to meet their stated objectives” and “divisive transport policies are pitting people and communities against each other on classic, social economic and racial lines”.
The meeting will be the last full council meeting ahead of May’s local elections.
The county council’s cabinet member for transport management, Andrew Gant, is also a sitting Liberal Democrat councillor on the city council.